Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to contact centers and in particular to a system and method for selecting an agent during initial routing based on media capabilities associated with a customer.
Description of Related Art
Contact centers are employed by many enterprises to service inbound and outbound contacts. A typical contact center includes a switch and/or server to receive and route incoming packet-switched and/or circuit-switched contacts and one or more resources, such as human agents and automated resources (e.g., Interactive Voice Response (IVR) units), to service the incoming contacts or customers. Contact centers distribute contacts, whether inbound or outbound, for servicing to any suitable resource according to predefined criteria. In many existing systems, the criteria for servicing the customer from the moment that the contact center becomes aware of the customer until the customer is connected to an agent are client or operator-specifiable (i.e., programmable by the operator of the contact center), via a capability called vectoring. Normally in present-day ACDs when the ACD system's controller detects that an agent has become available to handle a contact from a customer, the controller identifies all predefined contact-handling queues for the agent (usually in some order of priority) and delivers to the agent the highest-priority, oldest customer that matches the agent's highest-priority queue. In contact centers, quickly finding and assigning a well-qualified agent to service and fulfill a customer's need is important in providing improved customer satisfaction.
Traditional contact center technology matches incoming contacts to agents based on a combination of the customer's identity, the topic that relates to the request (such as attributes of the request), the media channel that the customer is currently using for the request (Voice call, Email, Instant message etc.), the priority of the request, the length of time, agent availability, agent skill sets, agent's media channels, and other factors during the call routing process.
Specifically, traditional contact routing relies on routing customers based on matching an agent with the media capability that the customer initiates at the time of communication with a contact center. Communication between the customer and the agent at the contact center may be accomplished by one or more media capabilities. A media capability is a form of media communication and includes a communication channel. Media capabilities may include, but are not limited to, a web capability, a text capability, a voice capability, a video capability and/or a video with voice capability. Further, the customer may also communicate with the agent at the contact center through social media networks. The media capabilities may vary in characteristics like bandwidth requirement, the latency of support (i.e., how close to real-time, immediacy, responsiveness, etc.), the level of participation by the agent, usage of other system resources, and so forth. For example, an email capability uses relatively little bandwidth and there may be a moderately high tolerance for latency. In contrast, a voice capability using phone communication uses relatively more bandwidth and a video capability requires even more bandwidth.
Currently, when a customer communicates with a contact center for a work request, the media capability is matched when finding an agent. For example, if a customer initiates communication with a contact center using a media capability such as web chat, then an agent is matched to the customer who can respond via that media capability, i.e., web chat. However, if a customer begins with one media capability and wants to switch to a second media capability during their interaction with the agent, there is no guarantee the agent can support the second media capability. If the agent cannot support the second media capability, then the customer will need to be routed to a different agent.
For example, the customer may initially be speaking with an agent using a voice capability and may want to switch to a video capability. However, the selected agent may not support a video capability as the agent's device may not have that facility or may not be allocated the required amount of bandwidth for video communication. As a result, in order to comply with the customer's request, the contact center will have to reroute the customer to a new agent who's device supports has a video capability. Rerouting is inefficient as the customer must begin again with a new agent on the same issue (i.e., same work request). This rerouting of the customer is expensive in terms of time resolution, discontinuity for the customer, and general contact center efficiency since two or more agents will have worked on the same issue. Furthermore, as multimedia devices such as smart phones become more prevalent and the range of media channels easily accessible to customers increase, the customer switching between media capabilities is going to become a more frequent problem.
There is thus a need for an improved initial routing of a customer to an agent for a work request to include predicted future escalation and/or de-escalation of a media capabilities associated with the customer.